BRC-BIO: Neurobiology of Cognition and Emotion in Teleost Fish

About This Grant

With over 26,000 species, teleost fish form the most diverse group of vertebrates, exhibiting an astonishing variety of behaviors and brain structures. This diversity makes them powerful models for studying the mechanisms of brain evolution and function. One important unsolved question is how the teleostean brain mediates cognitive processes like learning and memory, decision-making, and emotion-related behaviors. This project will build tools and infrastructure to map how the teleostean fish brain mediates associative learning, cognition, and emotion. The resulting brain maps will visualize how the teleostean forebrain is organized compared to better-known mammalian brain structures. The lab will focus on the teleostean counterparts of the amygdala and the neocortex, which will increase the understanding of brain evolution and improve the use of zebrafish as a model for human brain disorders. This project is strongly committed to education and community engagement. Undergraduates will participate directly in research through a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE), where they will gain hands-on skills in behavioral testing, tissue imaging, and brain analysis. In an ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration with the Department of Arts and Design, called Zebrafish and the Art of Neuroscience, students will creatively explore the brain and showcase their work in an annual public exhibition and symposium where we will share research findings, spark interdisciplinary dialogue, and invite the public into the world of neuroscience. Using zebrafish, the project will generate a prototype functional connectivity atlas of associative learning that defines amygdaloid territories and other forebrain regions based on the distribution of molecularly defined neuron types and expression patterns of ~500 critical genes. In doing so, this project will enhance research capacity by establishing behavioral paradigms, computational infrastructure, and operational pipelines for immunohistology and gene activation-based mapping of neurons. The objective of Aim 1 is to refine a Y-Maze avoidance behavioral paradigm of associative emotional learning and visualize the functional connectivity of co-activated neurons of the amygdala and forebrain. The project will detect activated neurons by mapping phosphorylated S6 protein and the expression of early immediate genes such as c-fos. Next, the group will integrate images of the 2d slice-based sections into a 3D atlas matrix by applying and improving computational methods. In Aim 2, the group will implement spatial transcriptomics to map the activity patterns of ~500 genes to generate a molecular-based atlas of the zebrafish telencephalon (forebrain) and visualize similarities and differences to mammals and other tetrapods. The project leverages advanced imaging, transcriptomic profiling, and computational modeling to establish the basic infrastructure and knowledge skills for creating a publicly accessible neuroanatomical resource and scalable pipeline for future atlas development. Ultimately, this project will advance comparative studies of vertebrate brain organization and evolution, offering insights into the molecular basis of cognitive and emotional behaviors in teleosts. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.